The Priory Inn, Northcroft-on-Heugh
June 9

Toby Cunningham doesn’t think his has become the most boring job in the world.

He knows it.

For the last hour and a half he’s been sitting in the corner of a smoky pub trying to make a bitter top — they call it a ‘pint touch’ up here because you can’t get proper bitter, just the carbonated chemicals they originally brewed specially for the dock workers — last until he hears something he can include in his report other than complaints about the weather or how bad the unemployment situation is.

Because that’s all it seems to be these days, waiting around and filling in forms.

And driving.

Jesus, he’s sick of that. If it wasn’t for the fact that his expenses were so ludicrously easy to fiddle he might be tempted to think the fuck with it and put in for a desk job. It might not be what he’d joined up for, but at least he’d have Saturday nights free.

They’d warned him at Stokes Bay that being a secret agent isn’t all yachts, Martinis and pouting blondes. Too bloody right it isn’t. The most fun Toby’s had in the last six months was winding up that lanky kid who got turned into a girl. A man is following you. He’s armed, and he may be under orders to kill you. Oh yeah, and it’s an alias, of course. Happy days.

Unless it was the time he’d snogged her on the way over to the Isle of Wight. He hadn’t meant to, but those come-to-bed eyes had pulled the rug from under his feet. Did she realise what effect that kind of look had on a bloke? When he knows that a tasty bit of stuff like she’d become is gagging for it?

And he’d tried to make out he wasn’t gay.

For what seems to Toby like the eighth or ninth time since he sat down with his drink, someone has put Roxy Music’s ‘Dance Away’ on the jukebox. Jennie had been fond of that band — when they were still pushing the boundaries, before the post-punk backlash had produced this bland wallpaper music you were tortured with everywhere you went. He hopes that whoever she’s with now, he’s looking after her, because if he isn’t–

You’re getting soft, TC. You know damn well that you can’t afford to care about anyone in this line of work.

“By, it’s gettin’ a bit parky out there,” remarks yet another of the regulars as he comes through the door, as if the gradual fall in temperature is a phenomenon only he has been blessed with the ability to experience.

The geezer’s right, though. Toby wonders just how far north they’ve sent him. Nottingham’s the normal limit of his travels, and even there he always feels that if he sticks his heel into the grass it’ll meet permafrost. Walking up from the car park next to the bus station — it’s a bus station in the sense that Linda McCartney is a virtuoso keyboard player — he’d watched the old church you could see from New Stranton disappear before his eyes in churning clouds of fog. It’s supposed to be June, for Christ’s sake. What do you get for living here, government-issue long johns and a free instruction booklet on how to make igloos?

Then there’s the accent. If the locals had spoken proper Geordie he might have understood more than one word in five, but this was a speeded-up version that often sounded closer to Scouse than anything else. What the hell did ‘feggie’ mean? Who or what was a ‘rarf’?

And their attitude towards women! So far behind the times he half expects to look out of the window and see pterodactyls circling in the sky — or he might if there actually was a sky. Toby’s all for keeping a girl in her place, making sure she knows who’s wearing the trousers, but he draws the line at assuming she’s on the game just because she walks into a pub on her own.

He realises he would have been assigned to this shithole sooner or later. It was precisely because of the town’s cultural and geographic isolation that the MoD had dumped Helen Sutton here when they found she wasn’t just a carrier but a potential transmitter as well. No great loss to the country this place, if it had to be put under quarantine like southern Bucovina.

But it means keeping a watchful eye on the inhabitants, for there’s always a chance that Helen might have infected some of them during the fourteen years she’d lived on the headland. In theory she shouldn’t have been able to do that much damage; the trigger hadn’t arrived until a few weeks before she died. Yet she’d passed the virus to Solange Malraux four years earlier, and what a pack of rabid hounds that had unleashed!

In Toby’s opinion the people here are probably as safe as they’d be anywhere else. After Malraux’s meddling — she was calling herself de Monnier now, he remembered — had resulted in Helen’s death the clean-up squad had gone into intergalactic overdrive. Many had posed as newspaper reporters. There’d even been one or two bogus television crews. Experts in psychological profiling, every man jack of them. If any trace of the disease had remained, they’d have found it.

He takes another sip from his glass. The pub is starting to fill up, particularly around the pool table on the raised level furthest from the bar. Youngish crowd, all Edwardian suits and flouncy dresses, as if the 60s had been wiped from the history books. The married couples have gravitated towards the alcoves to the left of the main door; mostly they just sit and stare, out for the sake of appearances, nothing holding their relationship together except that it’s too much bother to bring it to an end.

He decides to go for a piss before he drives back to New Stranton, and the 3-star hotel where he’ll write a draft report and change into his glad rags before heading off in search of whatever passes for action over there. He’ll score, that’s not in doubt; what with is a different matter.

The condom machine in the Gents is broken, so he makes a mental note to visit the toilets in the Grand as soon as he gets there. He doesn’t give a shit what little problems his one-night stands might bring to the bellies of the women he fucks, but the treatments they administer in VD clinics aren’t designed to leave you indifferent as to whether or not you might have to go back for more. It makes his cock feel tender just remembering the nurse’s face.

When he returns to the bar, the three girls behind the counter are deep in conversation. Toby notices that they keep glancing towards the pool table, where two women in black jackets and dresses are handing out leaflets.

“Bit early for the Sally Army, isn’t it?” he quips.

“Worse than them,” says the barmaid who’d served him earlier. “This lot are tryin’ to get everyone to pack in drinkin’.”

“Drinkin’, smokin’, gamblin’, you name it,” complains her colleague.

“They won’t live longer, but it’ll certainly feel like it,” laughs Toby.

“Yer what?”

“Just the punchline to an old joke. So who are they, a temperance society?”

“Church of the…what was it again, Steph?”

“Eternal Mind.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Toby’s hopes of a shag collapse faster than the England middle order on a green wicket.

The leaflet is professionally laid out, with a picture of Northcroft Borough Hall in the top right-hand corner. It invites the reader to a ‘dabara’, which Toby interprets as a kind of evangelical religious meeting, to be held there the following evening at 9 o’clock. The principal speaker will be an individual named Deng Liu-xiang, who promises to deliver a message that will ‘change forever the way you look at the world’. Admission is free, and a rider at the end stresses that donations will neither be asked for nor accepted.

Yeah, right.

Just another crank, out to make a killing with some half-baked eastern philosophy culled from the Bhagavad Gita or the I-Ching, that in the end boiled down to nothing more profound than a series of platitudes most junior school kids would regard as an insult to their intelligence.

But why target Northcroft?

The headlanders might be ignorant, but they’re not stupid. Their wallets aren’t exactly bulging either.

It’s enough to persuade Toby that he ought to call it in before he investigates this ‘church’.

He uses the payphone by the fruit machine. The number he dials is preceded by no STD code, and the coins he inserts are purely for show.

When he replaces the receiver, Toby Cunningham is no wiser than when he picked it up.

Watch and wait.

Just for a change.

He grabs his jacket and heads for the door. On the other side of the road, next to the gate that opens onto St Hild’s churchyard, the proselytisers have been joined by two men in their early thirties, both wearing smart black suits and both looking handy enough to sort out any trouble their associates might encounter. Toby quickly formulates a plan of action that will allow him to follow them at a distance, but before he’s walked more than a few steps one of the men begins loping across to intercept him.

“Good evening, friend!” he grins, holding out his hand. “Simon’s the name, enlightenment’s the game!”

Toby shakes it firmly. Now that his cover is blown, he decides to milk this guy for every drop of information he’s willing to give.

He takes the leaflet from his pocket and pretends to study the text.

“Interesting stuff,” he mutters.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Got your work cut out if you’re preaching abstinence in a town like this.”

“No cause is too hopeless,” beams the older of the two women. “I’m Gemma. This is Paul and his sister-in-law Alice.”

Toby notices that they’ve moved to cut off his retreat. He can also see that Alice is heavily pregnant.

Clever.

“I’m intrigued, I admit,” he says. “The problem is, I’ve been ripped off by this sort of thing in the past.”

“We won’t ask you for any money,” Gemma assures him.

“I meant ripped off in a…well, in a spiritual sense I suppose.”

“It didn’t do quite what it said on the tin?”

Toby returns her dazzling smile. She’s very craftily established her status as the leader of this troupe. Deng Liu-xiang needn’t lose sleep over the size of his Jersey bank account if he has many more followers as charismatic as this classy broad.

“Something like that.”

“We’re different. Although we call ourselves a church, we don’t put forward a set of beliefs, we don’t adhere to a creed and we are not here to make converts. All we’re doing is presenting a new way of thinking, a programme of mental exercises if you will, that have enriched our lives and that we feel compelled to pass on.”

“It’s a completely non-profit making organisation,” Alice puts in.

“So if I came along tomorrow evening I’d just get some advice about fine-tuning the old grey matter?” Toby asks her. “It won’t be a case of ‘this is what we can do for you, but only if you sign up for a correspondence course’?”

“You really have come across movements like this before,” laughs Gemma. “But it’s not a teaser, it’s the whole show.”

“I can’t say I’m not tempted. But as you can probably tell I’m a stranger up here, and the truth is I’ve arranged to meet an old mate from college for a few bevvies before I go back on Monday. Can’t see him being too chuffed if I drag him to a self-help gig. Him or the rest of his pals.”

“Why don’t you let Simon and I introduce you to her now?”

“Her?”

“Deng Liu-xiang, our inspiration. She’s always interested in meeting new people.”

Bingo! Worked like a charm!

“I’m Ben,” says Toby. “Ben Webster.”

“Well, Ben Webster, if you come with us I promise you’re in for a real treat.”

It takes less than five minutes for Simon and Gemma to lead him through the churchyard, past the rugby ground and a semi-derelict hospital to a fog-bound Marine Parade, bordered on one side by a wide stretch of grass offering no protection from the chilling breeze coming off the sea, and on the other by a four-storey terrace set back from the road by a series of long, bedraggled front gardens.

The last of these has been covered in tarmac and marked out as a car park.

Belonging to the Gladstone Hotel.

“Here we are,” smiles Gemma, and if the klaxons were only audible in the distance before, now they’re shrieking from every rooftop and chimney.

Not so bored now, are we? Oh no!

A foyer decorated with paintings of seascapes and a framed marine chart showing the harbour entrance. To the left, one door gives onto a television lounge, another an empty and unattended bar. Ahead, a narrow staircase and to the right of that the dining room.

Toby’s mind photographs these and countless other details as it goes into full operational alert.

Your part in this is to help out at the Gladstone, that’s all.

What the fuck has that stupid cunt gone and done?

A single movement from Gemma’s beautifully pencilled eyebrow has Simon hurrying upstairs.

“Liu-xiang will be down directly,” she tells Toby. “I think she’s amazing.”

From the dining room emerges a woman who appears to be in her middle thirties. She’s wearing a mauve twinset and a charcoal pleated skirt. Her hair is styled in the same fashion as Gemma’s, tightly curled and held in place by a thin net.

“Will you be wanting refreshments?” she asks timidly.

“I don’t believe so. Later, perhaps.”

“Very well, madam.”

“Thank you, Sylvia. You may return to your duties.”

Toby’s already heightened awareness reaches stratospheric levels of vigilance. That was the behaviour of a countess to a scullery maid, not a guest to a hotel proprietress.

But now it’s Gemma who begins showing deference, for the young woman descending the staircase emits an aura that demands it.

Her sleek, shoulder-length raven hair is brushed forward into a long fringe, framing pale, unexceptional features invigorated by intelligent almond-shaped eyes and full, dark red lips. Her emerald cocktail dress has only one sleeve, loose and gathered at the wrist with a thin cord, exposing her left shoulder, her plump, freckled left arm and rather more of her sizeable left breast than would be acceptable in most company. As she enters the foyer she extends one bejewelled, crimson-nailed hand for Gemma to kiss, then uses the other to dismiss the woman from her presence.

Deng Liu-xiang looks her visitor up and down, making him feel as if he’s being auctioned at a slave market.

“Welcome to the Gladstone Hotel, Ben Webster,” she says softly in an accent that carries just a hint of her Far-Eastern origins.

“It’s uh…it’s an honour to meet you.”

“Is Ben Webster your real name? Or is it another alias?”

Toby takes a step backwards. If he’d leapt out of the foyer, across the Town Moor and over the cliffs into the sea it wouldn’t have been far enough.

“You…” he gulps.

The girl Toby last saw climbing into Suki Tatsukichi’s car outside St John’s House flicks back her fringe, allowing him a clear view not only of the rows of tiny gemstones adorning her brows but also the larger jewel she wears in the exact centre of her forehead.

“Clearly they did not tell you that Ruth Pattison has gone over to the kuzkardesh gara,” she smirks. “Or that her conversion was the result of a deliberate move by the humans you work for to silence her. Perhaps you are not held in such high esteem by your superiors as you like to think, agent Cunningham.”

Toby’s dash for the door is anticipated by Simon, who employs his robust frame to shoulder-charge him aside. Toby manages to stay on his feet and aim two beefy punches into his opponent’s midriff, but the guy wrestles him to the floor with the ferocity of the possessed.

“Duralga!” hisses Ruth. “Hazir!”

Simon’s body goes limp. His eyes lose their focus. Toby pushes him away and tries to stand but can’t. It’s a few seconds before he realises that Ruth doesn’t want him to.

“What the hell are you?” he throws at her.

“You will address this avatar as saylanan,” she commands him.

And in response, all Toby Cunningham can do is whisper his assent.

The room is surprisingly small, the bed only just wide enough for two to lie comfortably together. It has a lived-in feel; this must be where Ruth has slept since she first arrived at the hotel five months ago.

Does her reluctance to move indicate that she’d miss these quarters, that despite her transformation into a kuzkardesh gara — a hive queen, no less! — there remains within her a spark of humanity, one which might yet flare into life and save the town from being turned into a miniature southern Bucovina?

Toby doesn’t think so. Once the meme rewrites your subconscious the fat lady has sung, changed out of her costume and gone for a four-course meal in a fancy restaurant.

Except in one instance, and given Yvette de Monnier’s decision to go rogue after she’d been deprogrammed he wondered if she really was the exception that proved the rule.

Not that it matters to him any more. Ruth is holding her transmissions in check for the moment, keeping her acolytes as human as possible until she feels she’s in a position of such strength that the MoD will be forced to acknowledge her as an equal, yet the mental virus she’s infected him with has already made it impossible to leave her. Three times this evening he’s walked out of the front door, and on each occasion he felt as if he was abandoning a starving child in a burning building. It was as bad when he tried to phone HQ; the numbers kept forming and then dissolving in his head, never quite coming into synch with the fingers that wanted to dial them.

It’s his own guilt that the meme is feeding on. Deep down he must regret being the one who let Richard Brookbank walk into de Monnier’s trap, who fucked with her on the way to Hayden Park, who goaded her into a snog on the ferry, then insulted her about it later.

Well, she’s got her own back now. She’s made him her hyzmatkar.

Hyzmatkar.

Rough translation: human servant.

That’s what he’s been reduced to, Richard Brookbank’s personal fucking slave.

He daren’t imagine what indignities she’ll make him suffer through the course of the night.

And the next night, and the next…

Who the hell gave the order for her to be assimilated into the Sunny Hollow hive? Which genius failed to figure out that by being thrust into a body Yvette de Monnier had inhabited, Richard might very well have inherited her gift? What kind of surveillance team were so incompetent they let her return to Northcroft and begin a recruitment campaign?

Watch and wait.

Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right’s doing.

Toby starts looking through the pile of records stacked beside the Dansette opposite the wardrobe. It’s mostly MOR crap, but there’s a half-decent Stevie Wonder album he wouldn’t mind listening to before that bald-headed cow ties his wrists to the bedposts and takes her revenge on him.

No doubt it all just sounds like background noise to a kuzkardesh gara. Bit like lift music — or what’s in the charts nowadays.

The door opens, and to Toby’s surprise in walks Gemma.

“How are you feeling?” she asks him.

“What the fuck do you care?”

“That’s good. You’re not too far gone yet.”

She lifts a polythene bag from her jacket pocket. Toby’s eyes spring from their sockets when he sees the silvery, lozenge-shaped object inside it.

“How the…?” he gasps. “Jesus Christ, you’re…”

“I’m not Yvette de Monnier. She — or rather he — is in Romania trying to sort out the mess your lot created.”

“We’ve got it under control. We’ll nab her as soon as she tries to–“

“You really don’t have the faintest idea who she is, do you?” interrupts Gemma. “Cathryn Simmons is Gabriela Balcescu’s daughter. She was abducted during an Allied raid in the spring of 1942 so she could be used as a hostage to prevent the Bucovina hive joining forces with the Nazis. But we haven’t time to discuss that. Are you familiar with the way the transfer device works?”

“Yeah…it copies and rewrites the conscious memory.”

“It also stores the subconscious. That means it’s our ‘get out of jail free’ card. I used it after Ruth had converted me to wipe the virus and return to the person I was when Yvette and I swapped. It was difficult, make no mistake about that. Took every ounce of willpower I had. Ruth isn’t exerting her full control over us yet, but for a few hours I felt as if I was her most dedicated follower.”

“So why not use it on her?”

“It’s not as straightforward as that. She has to be the last one to touch it before the process begins, or we’ll just be exchanging one hive queen for another. Anyway, I can’t get near the bitch because of that lunk Simon Whitaker — who’s soon to become your bosom pal if we don’t act now.”

“Wait a minute. If you’re suggesting what I–“

“Yes, I am. And a minute may be all we have.” She begins unwrapping the device from its polythene cover. “I’ll be honest with you. Even if we get Richard back, the changes that have already been made to your subconscious will stay. That’s something you’re just going to have to live with. But there’s a real chance that if you spend the night in Ruth’s bed, by tomorrow you’ll be as loyal to her as Simon is. I can’t afford to let that happen.”

Gemma has him in a headlock before he realises she’s moved. Although he struggles free, the ice-cold object she’s attached to the back of his neck seems to be willing him into immobility.

It’s alive!

The fucking thing’s alive!

He feels his body falling towards the bed, but it never gets there. Instead there’s a blinding yellow light and a moment of total and utter disorientation that makes him call into question his very existence.

Just as quickly it’s over.

Toby looks down at the jacket and skirt she’s wearing, at the unmistakeably feminine curves of her bust and hips, at the elegant black shoes on her nylon-clad feet. Her tongue finds the underside of her dental plate, begins to work loose the bottom set from her gum. Despite the strangeness of finding herself in a different body, she has the sensation of having been liberated from something.

Then she sees the burly young man lying face-down on the bed.

The man she used to be.

“Take it…” she hears him say, jabbing a finger towards the metallic object still fixed to the top of his spine. “Now, before she…oh God, you were further on than I thought…”

Toby’s mind snaps into focus. Gemma is no use to her now; the best she can hope for is to retrieve the transfer device and hide it until she can think of a way to get Ruth to use it on herself.

She eases the machine from Gemma’s neck and replaces it in the polythene bag. She stuffs it in her pocket just as Ruth walks through the door, with Simon in close attendance.

“We wondered where you were,” she says to Toby, lifting a bejewelled finger to the older woman’s cheek and holding her gaze with those searching aquamarine eyes. “You know, darling, the situation has reached too crucial a stage for you to be acting on your own initiative. Perhaps it might be prudent to give you a boost.”

Toby is aware only of Ruth’s formidable breasts crushing her own as the saylanan extends her bare arm, places a hand on her shoulder and mouths a few nonsense syllables in a foreign language. She can’t imagine for the life of her what effect Ruth thinks they’ll have.

But when Simon leaves the room Toby follows him because she knows that is what’s expected of her.

And later, as she’s climbing into bed beside him, the transfer device quite forgotten, she doesn’t see anything unusual in that either.